[jamiek88]

Reminds me of a joke we have in racing, noobs often carry too much speed into a corner, reluctant to brake too much thinking that is quicker when in reality braking harder, earlier, often enables better lap time.

To get over this mental hurdle we say ‘it’s not slowing down it’s reaching your minimum speed faster!’

[anyfoo]

That still breaks my head. Reaching your minimum speed slower means you have a higher speed for a longer time, covering more distance?

I know nothing about racing, is it maybe about reaching a higher minimum speed by doing so before the curve?

[hnuser123456]

If you brake too late, you often end up going below the minimum speed to avoid going off the outside of the track when you find out your grip wasn't as much as you thought.

Obviously, you want to brake as late as possible while still reaching the minimum speed demanded by the radius of the turn and your tires/downforce, which keeps your average speed as high as possible before the turn. But it very easy to get in a habit of braking too late, overshooting the turn, and taking a sub-optimal trajectory, which would be passed by someone who braked sooner and used some additional physics concepts.

The absolute fastest way is to brake as late as possible without overshooting, start the turn while you are about to let off the brakes (when the weight of the car has shifted towards the front wheels while braking, so you get more grip on your tires which are doing the steering), and as you let off the brakes, the car has rotational inertia that carries through the turn without needing the tires as much. (but too much rotational inertia = spinout.) Once you have the rotational inertia, you can start giving it gas before you finish the turn, and if the car is RWD, use the engine/oversteer to both increase your speed again and give you extra force pushing you through the inside of the turn. (By getting slightly too much inertia at the start of the turn (but not enough to spin out), then at the end of the turn, when your car would go off the outside of the track, instead have it slightly over-rotate the turn, so that you can use the engine to angle your forces both forward and into the turn, to help you finish without going off.) This way you get to use the engine to make some of the turn instead of the brakes for all of it, which is obviously faster. Then straighten the wheel when you've exited.

Drifting is just over-playing into the above mechanics, getting too much inertia too soon and doing a sideways burnout while countersteering (to bleed off the excess rotation) through the turn to look cool. The fastest is halfway between drifting and "driving naive", aka braking early and coasting through like normal road driving.

I play racing sims and couldn't win consistently until I understood all the above.

[rqtwteye]

It also depends on what comes next. E.g. if you have a long straight coming up, you want to straighten out things as soon as you can, so you can accelerate early and take that speed into the straight. It often makes sense to sacrifice speed in the turn for better speed on the straight.

[programjames]

Quite the opposite. Consider

  ------        ------
        \      /
         \    /
          \__/

versus

  ------   ------
        | |
        | |
        |_|

The second is higher on average. If you're turning 90° your velocity has to become zero in the direction you're going right now, so you might as well get there as fast as possible.

[anyfoo]

Ah, thanks. Here I thought that the distance that you’re not driving at full speed would be equal in both cases, in which case you want to “minimize the minimum speed time”, but the situation you present, where the distance you drive at minimum speed is equal, makes much more sense of course.